Concept
Noun
Related concepts (32)
Complement (linguistics)
In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase, or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments (expressions that help complete the meaning of a predicate). In many non-theoretical grammars, the terms subject complement (also called a predicative of the subject) and object complement are employed to denote the predicative expressions (predicative complements), such as predicative adjectives and nominals (also called a predicative nominative or predicate nominative), that serve to assign a property to a subject or an object: Ryan is upset.
Referent
A referent (ˈrɛfərənt) is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence Mary saw me, the referent of the word Mary is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, while the referent of the word me is the person uttering the sentence. Two expressions which have the same referent are said to be co-referential. In the sentence John had his dog with him, for instance, the noun John and the pronoun him are co-referential, since they both refer to the same person (John).
Grammatical category
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive.
Reference
A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to refer to the second object. It is called a name for the second object. The next object, the one to which the first object refers, is called the referent of the first object. A name is usually a phrase or expression, or some other symbolic representation. Its referent may be anything – a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept.
Generalized quantifier
In formal semantics, a generalized quantifier (GQ) is an expression that denotes a set of sets. This is the standard semantics assigned to quantified noun phrases. For example, the generalized quantifier every boy denotes the set of sets of which every boy is a member: This treatment of quantifiers has been essential in achieving a compositional semantics for sentences containing quantifiers. A version of type theory is often used to make the semantics of different kinds of expressions explicit.
Noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
Phi features
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features (denoted with the Greek letter φ 'phi') are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns (the latter are said to consist only of phi-features, containing no lexical head).
Nominal (linguistics)
In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement.
Collective noun
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones"). Some collective nouns are specific to one kind of thing, especially terms of venery, which identify groups of specific animals. For example, "pride" as a term of venery always refers to lions, never to dogs or cows.
Linguistic universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind.